Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Pathways To Civil War, Susumu Suzuki

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is about conflict escalation to civil war, and examines why some political confrontations escalate and why principal conflict actors continue fighting rather than reaching a number of political arrangements at various points of the course of conflict. Unlike previous studies, this study treats the progression to civil war as one of complex alternate paths. In so doing, building on the perspective of asymmetric information (i.e. uncertainty) problems as a cause of war, this study claims that involving each conflict actor's cognitive variances about its opponent's willingness to resolve and military strength would bolster either side's costly military mobilization …

Reading The Tea Leaves: The Media And Sino-American Rapprochement, 1963-1972, Guolin Yi

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation aims to find out what role(s) the media in the United States and China played in their historic rapprochement from 1963 to 1972. In order to examine how they covered the major events that affected Sino-American relations, I select seven elite U.S. media and two Chinese official newspapers to study. These media include: the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, CBS, ABC, NBC, People's Daily, and Reference News,

The study is based on the assumption that media, instead of reporting the information "objectively," have the ability to affect the content they deliver and set the agenda for …

Averting Dyadic Conflict: The Role Of International Political Economy, Michael James Langlois

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation explores the potential pacifying effect of dyadic economic interactions on international conflict. Research literature on the role of economic ties and conflict is complex and there are opposing findings. This study dives into this problem and brings new evidence to bear on this lasting debate. I argue that dyadic economic ties, introduced as dense economic integration (DEI) in this study, have a pacifying effect on the onset of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and the escalation of those disputes up to interstate war. To evaluate this argument, I examine the presence of conflict and the level of DEI from …